activations

[EtherealN]

lawn, attitude.

 

I know for a fact that people who legitimately have chewed up activations and has been nice about it to ED has been treated nice and moved on happy after the encounter.

 

Now, I detest activation-based systems as much as the next man (probably more so than many, even). Usually any activation stuff on a game is enough to make me walk away. But I'll let you notice that this is the most generous activation system I've seen - and compare it to EA or MS Flight Simulator and they're bloody saints.

 

Hell, my edition of MSFX is limited to ONE install. It can be deactivated, but if the comp fries then that's not going to be very easy. With DCS:BS you can legally install it on 8 computers simultaneously - whereas, if you read the EULAs on almost any other game out there it's one install only, and even if you legally speaking have the right to make a backup disc it won't work.

 

So tbh, they're not "dictating" how you use your comp. You have every ability to find out what's what before you purchase - and however misguided one can feel such a system is one has to recognize that ED and TFC are being awesomely nice both with initial activations, methods for reactivation, AND they're being nice to people who have legitimate issues.

[Distiler]

Anyone who has been playing flight sims for any amount of time is FULLY aware of how often games and OS's get reinstalled (Falcon dance, anyone?). Heck, LOMAC has been on and off my PC more times than I can remember. No malicious intent, no carelessnes, just my desire to rebuild my PC from time to time. Every two or three months I just nuke my drive and start from scratch. Too many experiments with drivers and other apps starts to plug up my disk and the process count starts climbing toward 50 because everyone thinks I want their crap and installed it without asking. It's time for an hour of effort to just install XP clean and fresh.

 

I might chew up my activations in a year or so. Then what? Don't dictate to me how I should operate my PC either. I've been accused in the past by other software publishers of being up to no good... but when you beta test MS flight sim software, it's not uncommon to scrap an entire install to resolve a problem.

 

I recommend you a dual boot, one OS for normal day to day stuff and another OS installation for testing crap. My XP for day to day stuff lasted 3 years without re-installing, my Vista is finishing first year as fresh as first day. 3D Mark and other benchmark applications saw no perfomance degradation in both cases. But if you chose to experiment with primary OS then face the consequences, at the end it's your choice.

 

If you don't screw too much, 8 activations/10 deactivatiosn can last you way more than DCS compatibility with future Windows, I mean many many years!

[Acedy]

Fellas, if anybody has problems with the copy protection mechanism he will get help of course, but please no more discussions about Black Shark's copy protection scheme in general, we have had this in the past and everything that needed to be said has already been said. All facts and opinions are well known by now, and you can decide yourself before buying if the protection is acceptable for you or not. Eagle knows that they can't make everybody happy, but that's how it is.

 

Thanks!

Edited April 15, 2009 by Acedy

[Coolhnd1]

Just to add my two cents. I had a problem with BS where after installing a game that included a DirectX upgrade. It caused BS to error when it attempted to load a mission with a DirectX error. I decided the only way to fix it was to try and reinstall BS so it could install it's version of DirectX back in. I didn't bother to deactivate it since I hadn't changed any hardware or the OS. Sure enough after reinstalling BS worked fine and I didn't lose any activations (reinstalling BS's version of DirectX didn't bother the other game either).

 

The lesson being if the OS doesn't change and you're not changing any hardware you don't have to worry. If these things do change just remember to deactivate first.